Page 16 - Vaccines

Vaccines and Catholic morality

In this book, attention will be directed mostly to
concerns about vaccines produced to confront the
current coronavirus pandemic, but, in order to assist
our reflection by way of comparison, reference will also
be made to similar worries about the combined MMR
(measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine produced in the
early 1990s, which raised similar moral concerns of
enduring significance.

b. Pastoral responses and Magisterial
interventions
The moral question of whether or not it is morally
legitimate to use vaccines derived from, or tested with,
biological material derived from aborted human foetuses
is not entirely new with the coronavirus, since an analo-
gous moral problem arose over 25 years before with the
combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine,
a combined vaccine which had been developed from
tissues taken from an aborted human foetus. Asked in
the autumn of 1994 for an opinion by the bishop of my
diocese, who had received a specific enquiry on the
matter from a lady, mother of a family, my advice to him,
which he then communicated to the clergy of the diocese
in an attachment to an Ad Clerum, presented the relevant
facts as they were known, the key moral principles and
norms involved, and their application to the question at
issue. It recalled the strict obligation never to perpetrate
a deliberate, direct abortion, the value of vaccines for the
health of the person and of the community, the duty of
public health authorities to protect the common good
through measures including vaccination in the case of an
epidemic or grave threat of such under the principle of
subsidiarity, while respecting the primary duty of
parents for the health of their children under the same

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